What the Democrats and Republicans agree on is far more damaging and dangerous than the wedge issues on which they supposedly don’t. We saw that last year with the enactment of Public Law 112-81, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA 2012), which had bipartisan sponsorship and sailed through both House and Senate with overwhelming bipartisan majority support. Now acceleratedly close on its heels comes H.R. 4310, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013 (NDAA 2013), which glided through the House with broad bipartisan support on May 18 and is now in the hands of the Senate:

Attached to that bill is a bipartisan-sponsored amendment summarized as follows:

“Amendment No. 114 – Reps. Thornberry (R-TX) and Smith (D-WA): The amendment would amend the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 (known as the Smith-Mundt Act) and the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Years 1986 and 1987 to clarify the authorities of the Department of State and the Broadcasting Board of Governors to prepare, disseminate and use public diplomacy information [propaganda] abroad and to strike the current ban on domestic dissemination of such material. The amendment would clarify that the Smith-Mundt Act’s provisions related to public diplomacy information [propaganda] do not apply to other federal departments or agencies (including the DoD).”

This amendment legalizes what many think the government has been doing for years anyway: using false propaganda to influence the decisions and control the minds of its own citizens. According to Buzzfeed:

“The tweak to the bill would essentially neutralize two previous acts – the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987 – that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns… The new law would give sweeping powers to the government to push television, radio, newspaper, and social media onto the U.S. public. ‘It removes the protection for Americans,’ says a Pentagon official who is concerned about the law. ‘It removes oversight from the people who want to put out this information. There are no checks and balances. No one knows if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false…’ Critics of the bill point out that there was rigorous debate when Smith Mundt passed, and the fact that this is so ‘under the radar,’ as the Pentagon official puts it, is troubling… The evaporation of Smith-Mundt and other provisions to safeguard U.S. citizens against government propaganda campaigns is part of a larger trend within the diplomatic and military establishment… In December, the Pentagon used software to monitor the Twitter debate over Bradley Manning’s pre-trial hearing; another program being developed by the Pentagon would design software to create ‘sock puppets’ on social media outlets [such as Facebook, Twitter and online forums]; and, last year, General William Caldwell, deployed an information operations team under his command that had been trained in psychological operations to influence visiting American politicians to Kabul.”

DemandProgress.org asserts that “The NDAA amendment legalizing mass propaganda campaigns would remove all distinction between a hostile foreign audience and American one, turning the massive information operation apparatus within the federal government against its own people.” They offer yet another online petition/email campaign to oppose it, but many consider such initiatives to be impotent slacktivism:

Our rapidly accelerating descent into Orwellian police-state fascism will not be stopped or even slowed by signing one online petition or one thousand. And it won’t be reversed at the ballot box, because voting either Democrat or Republican keeps the same corporate-controlled oligopoly in power, and voting any other way is at best an act of defiance: